Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience

ISBN-13: 9780415089593 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 184 str.

Howard Caygill

Opis

The writings of the Weimar philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin continue to provoke controversy in the fields of philosophy, critical theory and cultural history. In this reinterpretation, the author argues that all of Benjamin's work is characterized by its focus on a concept of experience derived from Kant but applied by Benjamin to objects as diverse as urban experience, visual art, literature and philosophy. The book analyzes the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour. By representing Benjamin as primarily a thinker of the visual field, the author brings forward previously neglected texts on inscription and the visual field and aims to cast many of his more familiar texts, for instance the Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a new light.

Spis treści

Preface and acknowledgements -- References and abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 The programme of the coming philosophy -- The concept of experience -- A transcendental but speculative philosophy -- Language and the infinities -- Philosophising beyond philosophy -- The experience of modernity -- 2 Speculative critique -- Experience and immanent critique -- The development of immanent critique -- Mourning and tragedy -- Modernism: ftom immanent to strategic critique -- The modern epic -- 3 The work of art -- Image and experience -- The speculative image -- The critique of art -- Technology and the work of art -- The work of art in the epoch of its technical reproducibility -- 4 The experience of the city -- Speculative cities -- Philosophy in the cities -- Urban poetics -- The image of the ciry -- Afterword: the colour of experience -- Notes -- Biliography -- Index.

O autorze

Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, University of London.